D-V-O-D-1

This DVD is a pretty typical retrospective compilation of concert footage and music videos. It has a little good, a little bad, and a lot of nostalgia. Released approximately 2 months after guitarist Denis d'Amour lost his battle to cancer in 2005, it is comprised primarily of material from the band's progmetal pinnacle 1987-1991. There are a couple of purely thrash era videos, but the focus era is clear.

The good (I suppose this is the nostalgia part as well): As already stated, the target era is what most prog fans of the band consider the sweet spot. The largest single section of live material features 4 songs from Nothingface performed live at Montreal's Musique Plus. Oddly enough, the cover of Astronomy Domine, though the music video is featured later. Five additional of full songs from three other concert clips are featured. It gives an excellent cross section of the bands evolution from thrash band to scifi progmetal pioneers. Also included are six music videos with three included sets of footage from the video shoots and recording sessions. One of the included music videos is Psychic Vacuum from Dimension Hatross. Prior to seeing this DVD I was unaware of its existence. A very surprising MTV era video due to its extreme dissonance.

The bad: A sadly predictable drawback of the era featured is the technology used in the live recording. At the time Voivod was not a big budget act. It is unfortunately reflected in the quality of the sound. The weird part is the DVD has a 5.1 mix. If they did clean the sound up, I shudder at the thought of the source quality. In all fairness, most of us around that time were lucky to even have stereo sound coming from our TV's, so little would be noticed if these were recorded on the most cutting edge equipment of the day. The other aspect is the videos are themselves a bit campy when the music does such a fine job of imagery creation in its own right.

As a Voivod fan, I consider this an essential retrospect. Even for someone who is a progmetal history aficionado DVOD-1 would be an good addition to a video collection. For everyone else, its probably not a good starting point for Voivod's work due to the lacking sound quality. Fun nonetheless. So legitimately, good, but not essential. 3 stars.